Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says she knows many New Zealanders were upset, frustrated and angry about the Covid rulebreakers which plunged Auckland into lockdown.
Opinion by Claire Trevett
Claire Trevett is the New Zealand Herald’s Political Editor, based at Parliament in Wellington.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern does not like to be wrong and so prides herself on her love of detail and determination to find everything out before pronouncing judgment.
The problem is, this can result in a rather stubborn inability to acknowledge she may not always be right: or atleast a level of intolerance with others who do not know as much as her.
That has ended up pitting her in a rather unseemly battle in public with Case L: a person with Covid-19 who defended herself after the PM criticised her for going to work before her sibling was tested for Covid-19. It transpired L herself also had Covid-19.
Ardern had first claimed Case L was supposed to be self-isolating when she went to work at KFC before her sibling tested positive for Covid-19.
The trouble is that the evidence has only shown just how confusing were the messages being sent out.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and director general of health Dr Ashley Bloomfield leave after a Covid-19 update on Monday. Photo / Mark Mitchell
All students at the school were told to get tests before returning to school, and the advice for "close contacts" at the school was fairly clear throughout: but that was only the classmates and teachers of Case A.
The family members of other students were "asked" to get tests but not told to, and asked to work from home "if possible". There was no requirement for them to do either in the first two letters they got.
Even in hindsight, it is difficult to piece together exactly what the family members of the "casual plus" students were meant to be doing.
Further confusion came from a Facebook post by the Covid-19 team which stated in black and white that L and her family "complied with advice they were given at the time".
In fact, that Facebook post seems to show it was L's case that prompted the change in rules that L is now being accused of breaching.
It was not until February 23 (the day L's sibling's result was known) that unequivocal advice was sent for all members of the school community, rather than just the close contacts of the first Covid-19 case, to get tested and isolate.
Rather than concede the family had grounds for confusion, the PM and Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins simply found other reasons the family should have known they were in the wrong.
Hipkins said regardless of official advice, common sense should have told L to stay at home.
L's sibling was among the last at the school to get tested, and two in the household had symptoms. Hipkins said neither had been tested, and common sense would dictate that the entire household should stay home until that happened.
That may be true, but relying on common sense to prevail over confusing advice is a tough ask.
Director general of health Ashley Bloomfield was asked about "luck" in Covid, and said the ministry left nothing to luck. But it was bad luck that the single "casual plus" student at that school who turned out to have Covid-19 was also one of the last to get tested.
The Ministry of Health should be asking itself hard questions about the decision to split the school's students into close and casual-plus contacts depending on which class they were in – and what the advice for close and casual contacts should have been.
The PM would also do well not to cast stones while asking others not to do so – especially those who do not have her encyclopaedic knowledge of the rules.
Some mention has been made of the imbalance of power: the PM, who people know and have tended to trust, versus those she is criticising.
It was always a stretch for her to argue that people should not seek to blame or pillory others, while in the next breath doing just that herself over and over again.
She was one reason those people are now facing "the judgment of the entire nation".
There is as yet no suggestion that the people who made mistakes in this cluster were motivated by malice or defiance: they were at best thoughtless and at worse reckless.
Yes, the consequences were dire. But the question Ardern didn't ask was whether they were letting her down – or whether she (or at least officials) was letting them down, even if just a bit.
